Here at CES, I just visited with the folks behind Swype, the touchscreen input technology that knocked my socks off in canned demos I’ve seen, and which recently shipped on its first phone, Samsung’s Omnia II. I finally got some hands-on experience, and…I’m not only impressed, I’m more impressed than before, because the learning curve is small and the accuracy is remarkable.

Watching it in action remains the best way to understand it:

The only thing I don’t like about Swype: The company’s strategy is to get it built into as many phones (and tablets, and other devices that need a touch keboard) as possible. So they’re not selling it as a stand-alone app. If by some miracle this technology were to become available on the iPhone, it would be a great day indeed.

They claim that most people find it faster than other input methods, and just about everybody finds it pleasant. Makes sense to me: I can input text pretty quickly on my iPhone, but the tap, tap, tapping gives me a headache.

Oh no! As if tweets weren’t inane enough already, now there’s a technology that prevents users from even taking the brief fraction of a second between words to tap the space bar and think about what they’re saying. Stream of consciousness has its place as a literary device and all but yikes!

I tried this this weekend on my sister’s MyTouch and good lord was it awful. I am baffled to see Harry raving about it (in his more recent article). It’s true that it’s faster than the tap, wait, tap, wait, tap, wait that Android’s on-screen keyboard requires, but I can not imagine trying to type even a brief email on it and it’s still a big step down from the usability of the iPhone keyboard.

I dreaded the iPhone’s touchscreen only keyboard (to a degree where I bought a Windows Mobile phone with a hardware keyboard a few months before the iPhone came out) and the Android keyboard situation was exactly what I feared. Of all the innovations in the iPhone, I feel like creating a usable touchscreen keyboard is the most significant and really overlooked and under-appreciated because even three years later, no one else has come close.